Green On Red Gallery is proud to announce its participation in Volta 15, Basel, Switzerland for the 10th time with four of its gallery artists with the theme of Memory and Desire, Booth 01. They include Alan Butler, Damien Flood, Caroline McCarthy and Xavier Theunis with new work completed for the exhibition at Elsässerstrasse 215, 4056 Basel.
Damien Flood’s earthenware clay ceramic figures are shown in combination with oil on linen paintings from his recent The Figure in the Carpet exhibition at Green On Red, Dublin, in 2018/19. This is not the first time his work has left the wall but it is the most explicit expression to date of the tension the artist likes to exploit in the transition from the real world to the fragmented world of his imagination and memory and the tension between a figurative and an abstract language. Crying Man (2019), Potter (2019), Metal Head (2019) and Moon Vase (2019) show off the artists considerable skill in this new medium. They also tug with dark humour at chords of association with primitive cultures and pagan offerings while echoing the emotional landscape of his oil on linens.
Xavier Theunis’s curiously titled Vue d’Atelier #23 continues his impeccable use of sharply cut adhesive vinyl paper, this time in a rainbow of gently curving, perfectly contiguous strips arranged in 3 equal columns. The vertical columns oscillate and sway adding to the up and down dance of colour. Colours range from fluorescent orange, yellow and pinks to sparkling white, sparkling gold and cerize over a 240 x 180cms expanse creating a luxuriant voluptuousness.
In her trademark understated fashion Caroline McCarthy picks the most modest and unpromising of starting points, the disposable plastic drinking straw - the subject and medium of choice for her first solo show and installation in Green On Red Gallery in 2011 - and performs conceptual summersaults giving the viewer on one level a whimsical composition but on another challenging their very belief system. Together Forever is the title of a new series of exquisite ink and gouache paintings on paper that will also be shown in her forthcoming solo show in Galerie Gisela Clement, Bonn ( opening June 25, 2019 ). The suggestion of permanence and unity is at odds with the bare facts of these trompe l’oeil renderings of a transigent condition or, in the words of the artist “ a dishevelled formalism “. She adds: “ Together Forever is a joyful expression of a hedonistic party, a celebration drunk on colour and excess with no thought for the headache tomorrow “.
Alan Butler’s cyanotypes and deskscapes continue to test and cross the lines between the digital and whatever we define as the real realm. Butler mines that dichotomy in rich of ways employing manual techniques of early photography and painting.
Xavier Theunis will have his first solo exhibition at Green On Red Gallery in 2019
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